The vast majority of stateless people do not choose to be that way.
There are many reasons why people become stateless – or are born that way. They include conflicting nationality laws, states becoming newly independent and the legacy of colonisation.
Here are four cases that illustrate the problems that arise when you lose the protection of a state.
Undocumented lives
MEXICO
There are more than 10 million stateless people globally, according to official estimates. Alejandro’s mother is one of them. Because of a lack of documentation, she is now in a nursing home in Mexico even though she has two sons who are US citizens. On paper she has the right to US citizenship, but in practice she can’t prove her identity. This means she must live separately from her family.
The search for identity
Berzan is from Kurdistan. His family, living in North Syria, belong to a group of 150,000 Kurds who lost their citizenship after the 1962 Syrian census, when Kurdish people were registered as foreigners. For this reason, Berzan was born without a nationality.
How many are stateless?
There are estimated to be as many as 15 million stateless people globally. But only 3.5 million have been officially counted, across 80 countries.
Three quarters of them live in just five countries:
- Myanmar
- Côte d’Ivoire
- Thailand
- Zimbabwe
- Latvia
The limits of statelessness statistics
Official statistics on statelessness are limited. They do not describe the full scale of the issue.
- Not all countries are included: Official statistics only include data from 80 of the 193 UN member states. The estimate of 10 million stateless people worldwide is based on an extrapolation from the 3.5 million known to be stateless.
- Not everyone without a country is counted as stateless: The figure of 10 million refers to those who fall under the UNHCR’s statelessness protection mandate. In addition to this, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) estimated that at the end of 2013 there were also around 1.5 million stateless refugees and around 3.5 million stateless Palestinians worldwide. This would bring the global total to around 15 million.
- Stateless people are very difficult to count: Data gaps, inconsistencies in the way people are counted, and differences in the definitions of statelessness between nations all blur the picture. In some European countries there is a problem of persons being reported as holding an ‘unknown nationality’, which further obscures the true number affected by statelessness.